Posted
by
Zonk
on Tuesday April 11, 2006 @08:19AM
from the see-it's-a-clever-twist-of-one-letter dept.

An anonymous reader writes "CNET.com.au has posted a commentary that attempts to cut away the hype surrounding Boot Camp. From the article: 'Boot Camp will do little to coax Windows XP users into switching to Mac OS X. For this to happen, Apple needs to either license out OS X to all users -- not just Mac owners -- or support a true Mac virtualisation application.'"

Last time I heard, Steve Jobs said something like "We are, and always will be, a hardware company." Now I'm not saying that Boot Camp will sell more hardware, but I don't think anybody expects Boot Camp to help sell more copies of OS X. Can you even buy an Intel Mac without OS X? I doubt it.

The reason Apple doesn't want to sell OS X to PC users (aside from the obvious ties with their more lucrative hardware business) is that OS X simply wouldn't be as stable or bulletproof in the PC world as it has been in the Mac world.

Nonsense. The reason Apple doesn't want to sell OS X to PC users is because they make much more money selling hardware than software. Apple is in business to make a profit (and fortunately they seem to believe that producing a great product is the right way to do that). They aren't going to intentionally do things that reduce their profits.

Don't forget that Apple has already been down the road of licensing the OS. It nearly killed them. People starting buying Power Computing machines because they ran Mac OS as well or better than Apple hardware, and significantly cut into their sales -- sure they were getting OS license fees, but at the same time it was causing Apple's market share to plumet. Even though between Apple and Power Computing the Mac OS market share was growing, the press saw Apple's market share going down and started sounding the death knells. This helped convince developers and consumers that Apple was irrelevant and (combined with many other factors, including increasing quality of Windows) they were in real trouble. It finally took Microsoft making a deal with Apple to keep producing Office for the next 5 years to reduce the hemoraging enough for a turnaround (which started with killing the licensing and bring out the iMac).

There are some differences today, Apple is hip because of the iPod and OS X, but it would still be a really tough battle to get to the point where OS X licenses replaced the lost revenue from hardware sales. That not to say that this could never happen, but I would say Apple would have to have 10%+ market share and growing before it would be worth the risk.

You can already run non-Apple OSes in a window on the Intel-based Macs by way of the Q Project [kberg.ch] (based on the open source QEMU [gibix.net]). Commercial virtualization solutions are being worked on by VMWare, Microsoft, and Parallels, among others. Parallels' Workstation 2.1 for Mac OS X [dad-answers.com] appears to be first to market (althought it, like Boot Camp, is beta software).

Untrue, I've legitimate copies of 3 MS operating systems. I'm a 25 year old home user, and I'll admit I've pirated plenty of software in my day but I just can't be bothered with black market versions of something I rely on every day.

I was thinking I was going to rip this apart as I have a legit WinXP CD and key, but then I remember that I obtained that WinXP CD and key from a corporation. I never paid for it, a company I worked for did. Now I think the only flaw is all the people who buy Dells just happen to have a license for the first copy of Windows they got (usually all upgrade are from their teenage relative or that guy they know who is a floor manager at ABC Warehouse).

I can't use the CD that came with my Dell to install Windows on a Mac. Virtually every computer today comes with a restore CD, not a Windows install disc. You need a full install CD to put Windows on a Mac, and that will set you back $200 or more. (You could get an OEM version, but to make that legal wouldn't you also have to buy a piece of hardware and use it with your Mac somehow?)

Sim City 4 never worked right on Windows, either, so don't blame Aspyr too quickly. I bought the deluxe version of the game for Windows, installed it on my bog-standard computer running Windows 2000, and it just didn't do anything. If you double-clicked the application icon, absolutely nothing happened. That game was an embarrassment to the craft of computer programming.

You don't explain Linux's stability because it's not stable on the desktop. Linux has a great reputation for stability because it's mainly installed on server equipment of at least moderate quality. Linux on the desktop is a disaster. Just as an example, yesterday I removed a FireWire DVD burner from my Linux computer and the kernel panicked. This is not uncommon. I can think of a dozen different ways to confuse Linux by adding or removing hardware.

You're obviously not speaking from hands on knowledge. People always say that Apple ignores backward compatibility and MS's problems are from it's insistance on providing backward compatibility, but this isn't necessarily true for either one. When Apple switched to the PPC platform almost all 68K programs ran without any problems and often saw an improvement in speed despite running in emulation. When Apple switched to OS X most OS 7/8/9 software continued to run without problems (and even some software going back to the 80's still worked.) Apple waited 3 years before having Macs that couldn't boot OS 9 directly and 5 years to stop pre-installing Classic on new Macs, but still support it under 10.4. When I upgraded my Win98 machine to 2K most of my games that were one or more years old couldn't be played and while I don't own either XBox, but from what I've been reading MS's support for XBox games on the 360 is hit or miss.

With Apple's switch to Intel the PPC Macs will still be supported under the next OS expected to be coming in December/January which is another 18-24 months of direct support plus 18-24 months security updates after the next-next OS has been released. People buying the Intel Macs are able to run most PPC programs under Rosetta while waiting for the programmers to release universal binary versions.

Unlike PC manufacturers, Apple tends to support new technologies first and drop legacy hardware sooner, but they can still be used as add-on cards or through USB/Firewire.